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Bottled water doesn’t get much greener than Belu’s. The British company’s drink was the world’s first to become carbon-neutral, in 2006. Its bottles, made from corn, can be composted into soil. Belu’s profits, meanwhile, are poured into projects that deliver clean water to parts of the world that lack access to it. And amid the thirst for all things sustainable, this has meant Belu — pronounced Blue — has gone down rather well. Sales of just $13,000 in 2004, its launch year, rose to close to $4 million in 2008. Defying the downturn, the company even managed a modest profit. But getting consumers to buy is only half the battle. All the granola credentials in the world won’t fund a promising business. To potential investors, it’s pesky things like risk and reward that still matter most. And as an ambitious nonprofit firm surviving in a ferociously competitive sector — rivals include Coca-Cola and Nestlé — Belu has been stymied more than most. "We’ve struggled to get funding, as Belu is aimed at helping the environment, not lining investors’ pockets," says Reed Paget, the Seattle native who is the company’s chief executive and founder. "That’s put a lot of strain on the company." Bereft of any experience running a business, Paget actually has a pretty remarkable record at Belu: half a million bottles of its water, each emblazoned with environmentally friendly messages, are sold monthly, and it’s now distributed in about 1,000 outlets in Britain. But Belu’s potential would be much bigger — global — if it could get funding. With Belu’s shares held by its own nonprofit, venture-capital and private-equity investors can’t expect the usual juicy reward in exchange for financial backing. Offered a savings-account- like return or the chance to buy shares whose dividends accrue to organizations working in the clean-water field, VCs have balked. "I probably would have had more success robbing banks than getting funding from those sources," Paget says. Environmental charities have been no more forthcoming. Investing in firms like Belu is "not what we’re here to do," says a Greenpeace spokesman. "Our role is campaigning." That’s left the firm reliant on a limited bunch of angel investors — from Body Shop cofounder Gordon Roddick to Big Issue Invest, experts in backing social enterprises — willing to stomach little or no return in exchange for long-term benefits to the environment. With $2.5 million raised through 32 painstaking rounds of funding, "the business is massively undercapitalized," says Ben Goldsmith, a London-based philanthropist and VC who’s among Belu’s creditors. "And that’s a challenge." Why not go the capitalist route and use the profits that a conventionally funded expansion would bring to increase his good works Pointing to the small profit he’s made on modest means, Paget is confident Belu can grow without more serious money. But for the chance to scale up his business, "if we can get it, we would definitely love it," he says. Paget is adamant, though, that it should be on Belu’s terms, not those of a traditional investor. He says it was important "to remove the ’We must maximize profit’ from our management system." Sure, Belu needs to be able to sell for more than the cost of production, but, he says, if it came down to more profit vs. more environmental benefit, VCs may suddenly decide they don’t want to be that deep a shade of green after all. But with Belu being unwilling to accept that risk, the cost to the company may be the sustainable growth of a clearly good business. It can be inferred from the passage that
One of the unresolved — and rather bitter — disputes in evolutionary biology is between the creeps and the jerks. The creeps (so dubbed by the jerks) think that evolutionary change is gradual. The jerks (so dubbed by the creeps) think it happens in sudden jumps that are separated by long periods of stasis. Probably, both are lame. Work done a couple of years ago by Mark Pagel of Reading University, in England, suggests that about a fifth of evolutionary change happens jerkily at around the time new species form. The rest creeps in gradually over the millennia. Species, however, are not the only things that evolve. Languages do too. And in the current edition of Science, Dr.Pagel and his colleagues publish evidence that they do so in a way which looks intriguingly similar to what happens in species. There was already some historical evidence for this. The English of Geoffrey Chaucer (born in the 14th century), for example, is incomprehensible to modem laymen, whereas that of William Shakespeare (born in the 16th) is not only comprehensible but held by some to be a model. Dr.Pagel, however, wanted to examine the question systematically and to include languages with no literary history in his analysis. To do so he looked at three well-studied parts of the linguistic family tree: the Banut languages of Africa, the Indo-European group from Eurasia and the Austronesians of the Pacific. In all three cases it is pretty clear how the branches connect up, even if it is not always obvious when particular splits occurred. Dr.Pagel did not, however, need to know that. He only needed to know the shape of the tree. That was because his hypothesis was that if linguistic evolution is jerky, the jerks will happen at the points where languages split — the equivalent of species splits in biological evolution. The way to test that is to track back along the branches leading from each existing language, and count the number of splits on each path before you get to the common ancestor of all. His hypothesis turned out to be correct. Languages are formed not, it seems, by a gradual drifting apart of two groups who no longer talk to each other, but by violent rupture. Around a third of the vocabulary differences between modem Bantu speakers arose this way, around a fifth of the differences between speakers of Indo-European languages, and around a tenth of the Austronesians. That compares with around a fifth for biological species. All this suggests that the formation of both languages and species is an active process. For species, adaptations to novel environments and the need to avoid crossbreeding with those on the other side of the split are both plausible hypotheses. For languages, the explanation may be a cultural rather than biological need to distinguish populations. As Noah Webster, the compiler of the first American dictionary put it: "as an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government." In other words, if you don’t speak proper, you aren’t one of us. The goal of Dr.Pagel’s study was to
Are the days of the nasty split over For the sake of the kids, some exes spend holidays together and bring along their new partners. Pass the tolerance, please. Randy and Susan, of Lake Charles, La, divorced in 2008, but they are far from sworn enemies. They’re among a fast growing number of divorced morns and dads who spend holidays together so the kids don’t have to choose between parents or shuttles back and forth. In a dramatic change from the traditional bitterness of divorce, many parted parents are doing their best to be cordial, even warm, especially on the most important days of the year. "Americans have come to view divorce as a natural experience." With mediation instead of litigation now available or required in 37 states, more couples than ever are splitting up without acrimony. "It’s a sea change," says Raoul Felder, a New York divorce attorney who took part in many of the most high profile and nasty breakups of the 1980s and 1990s. In the past, says Felder, divorce was about anger and revenge. Now, he says, a divorce is more likely to involve appraisers than private investigators. Experts say that by coming together, divorced parents provide a more stable and healthy environment for their kids. A decade ago the lingering animosity between Anne Browning and her ex-husband nearly ruined the holidays. The children would spend Christmas morning with Dad in Arizona, then catch a flight to Chicago for dinner with Morn. "It was hard," says Molly Mackin, the middle child, now 29. Times have changed. This year Molly and her husband, John, hosted Thanksgiving at their home near Sacramento, Calif, for everyone: her parents, her dad’s wife and her mom’s husband. The anger was gone. Browning, 54, says of her ex: "He was a different person then, and so was I." Such displays of gallantry were far rarer before 1969, when California Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the nation’s first taw permitting no-fault divorce. No-fault — which allows parents to split up without having to declare war — has become the norm rather than the exception. Mediation has also been on the rise: 13 states require it for divorces involving children, and 24 others allow judges to order it in almost any case they see fit. Plenty of parents already know firsthand what’s at stake for their kids, especially Gen-Xers, who grew up in a society where one out of every two marriages ended in divorce. They remember the restraining orders and midnight screaming matches that marred their own childhoods, and vow to spare their children similar turmoil. "Watching my parents go to war gave me a great model of what not to follow," says Jeff Thomas, 41, an organization consultant in Arizona. Another big change is the greater role played by today’s dads in the raising of their kids. Fathers who share in the parenting during marriage expect nothing less after divorce. "It never would have occurred to me to not parent my daughter" says Guy Regal, 39, an art and antiques dealer in Manhattan who sees his 6-year-old five days a week. Although researchers like Ahrons have known for years that how parents’ divorce matters even more than the divorce itself, some parents still have trouble not putting their children in the middle of conflict. Even when parents set aside their negative emotions to give their children a happy holiday, it isn’t always easy. There is still no cure-all medicine for the pain of divorce. Randy admits that on more than one occasion after he and Susan first split, he slipped away from the table to have a good cry alone in the bedroom, grieving for the irreparable fissure in his family. "You don’t long for the other person"; he says. "It’s about belonging to a whole family... You long for the completeness." Even for amicably divorced people like Randy and Susan, the ghosts of dashed dreams linger. It can be inferred from the last two paragraphs that
Bottled water doesn’t get much greener than Belu’s. The British company’s drink was the world’s first to become carbon-neutral, in 2006. Its bottles, made from corn, can be composted into soil. Belu’s profits, meanwhile, are poured into projects that deliver clean water to parts of the world that lack access to it. And amid the thirst for all things sustainable, this has meant Belu — pronounced Blue — has gone down rather well. Sales of just $13,000 in 2004, its launch year, rose to close to $4 million in 2008. Defying the downturn, the company even managed a modest profit. But getting consumers to buy is only half the battle. All the granola credentials in the world won’t fund a promising business. To potential investors, it’s pesky things like risk and reward that still matter most. And as an ambitious nonprofit firm surviving in a ferociously competitive sector — rivals include Coca-Cola and Nestlé — Belu has been stymied more than most. "We’ve struggled to get funding, as Belu is aimed at helping the environment, not lining investors’ pockets," says Reed Paget, the Seattle native who is the company’s chief executive and founder. "That’s put a lot of strain on the company." Bereft of any experience running a business, Paget actually has a pretty remarkable record at Belu: half a million bottles of its water, each emblazoned with environmentally friendly messages, are sold monthly, and it’s now distributed in about 1,000 outlets in Britain. But Belu’s potential would be much bigger — global — if it could get funding. With Belu’s shares held by its own nonprofit, venture-capital and private-equity investors can’t expect the usual juicy reward in exchange for financial backing. Offered a savings-account- like return or the chance to buy shares whose dividends accrue to organizations working in the clean-water field, VCs have balked. "I probably would have had more success robbing banks than getting funding from those sources," Paget says. Environmental charities have been no more forthcoming. Investing in firms like Belu is "not what we’re here to do," says a Greenpeace spokesman. "Our role is campaigning." That’s left the firm reliant on a limited bunch of angel investors — from Body Shop cofounder Gordon Roddick to Big Issue Invest, experts in backing social enterprises — willing to stomach little or no return in exchange for long-term benefits to the environment. With $2.5 million raised through 32 painstaking rounds of funding, "the business is massively undercapitalized," says Ben Goldsmith, a London-based philanthropist and VC who’s among Belu’s creditors. "And that’s a challenge." Why not go the capitalist route and use the profits that a conventionally funded expansion would bring to increase his good works Pointing to the small profit he’s made on modest means, Paget is confident Belu can grow without more serious money. But for the chance to scale up his business, "if we can get it, we would definitely love it," he says. Paget is adamant, though, that it should be on Belu’s terms, not those of a traditional investor. He says it was important "to remove the ’We must maximize profit’ from our management system." Sure, Belu needs to be able to sell for more than the cost of production, but, he says, if it came down to more profit vs. more environmental benefit, VCs may suddenly decide they don’t want to be that deep a shade of green after all. But with Belu being unwilling to accept that risk, the cost to the company may be the sustainable growth of a clearly good business. The last sentence of the passage suggests that
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